“Monument to Transformation” is a series of exhibitions, projections, publications, debates and lectures which have taken place over more than two years, in an interdisciplinary environment (art, humanities, economics and natural science theories).

The exhibition at Montehermoso is conceived as an imaginative and analytical space that – with a certain distance – enables the visitor to see and reflect upon the processes of change that started with the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) in Eastern Europe, the student demonstrations in Indonesia in 1998 or the Revolution in South Korea (1987) and which have, to a certain extent, continued until today. The way this topic is approached is influenced by a feeling of affiliation to these changes, which are in a way co-formed by us and whose impact affects and influences us. It is therefore an attempt to look at “transformation” as a “lived out” and gradually receding process.

This way of thinking about transformation is conceived as structured in tension between various methods from the fields of the social sciences and artistic practice. The experience of transformation in “Eastern Europe” is an independent theoretical field. In the context of transformation studies, the so-called Eastern European region has its own specific elements, which originated in the geo-political division of the world, irrevocably decided at the Jalta Conference as a consequence of the Second World War. The power division of the world into East and West can no longer be mechanically adopted without reservation – it cannot be used when trying to understand the processes of cultural signifying, cultural production and representation in that region. If one automatically accepts such a division, one assumes that those geo-political power polarities are recognizable in the “cultural material” – which means that cultural production is not viewed a priori, as creation, as a polluting semiosis, but as a mere representative of the recognizability of the East-West power polarity.